Janet Wittes was leaning toward a major in biochemistry at Radcliffe College until faculty mentor John Edsall noted her preference for inference and guided her to statistics. In 1970, with two toddlers in tow, Wittes and her husband—physician Robert E. Wittes—moved to Bethesda, Maryland, where she worked part time as a postdoctoral researcher with Jerome Cornfield at The George Washington University and he served in the USPHS Commissioned Corps as a Yellow Beret. She founded a consulting firm, Statistics Collaborative, in 1990 and remains its president.